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c. 2014 Religion News Service...

(The Christian Science Monitor) Members of Australia’s Muslim community were among thousands of people who laid flowers and other tributes at...

(The Christian Science Monitor) Iraqi Sheikh Naim al-Gaood was awakened before dawn with the grim news that Islamic State fighters had launch...

(The Christian Science Monitor) When German Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned a rash of hate-mongering on the streets of Dresden Monday, it ...

The Vatican ended an inquiry begun six years ago into U.S. nuns with a report designed to bury their differences and celebrate their contribution to the Catholic Church....

Some people see violence as an absolute wrong. Others see it as a sometimes necessary evil, with considerable variation as to just how often these times come up. I’m at the dovish end of the latter group: I believe that there are times—not many, not remotely as many as American foreign policy consensus or law enforcement norms would have it, but some times—when a violent action might be the least-bad available option. But a necessary evil isn’t a virtue; “least bad” doesn’t mean “good.”

Last week we drove 350 miles to Smith College, where our daughter was singing with the glee club at Christmas Vespers. Each year at a pair of services, campus and community enter liminal space by hearing sacred music from student choral and orchestral groups, pondering poetry and biblical readings by students and faculty, and singing carols together.  This year it also became a setting to turn attention to other matters. As a Facebook event page put it, “You can’t sing carols if you can’t breathe.”

A few recent conversations have gotten me to thinking about the large Load of Expectations people carry around with them this season. It’s a bit crazy making, really....

At such ideologically charged times, it is hard to discern what a life of Christian faithfulness looks like. Miguel De La Torre offers a good resource.

c. 2014 Religion News Service...

c. 2014 Religion News Service...

c. 2014 Religion News Service...

In the 12th century, a Benedictine nun had a vision of Jesus’ humanity. It couldn’t have happened on a better night.

This week's 2 Samuel and Luke passages get me thinking about promising. Not coerced promises. A promise to obey traffic laws in order to get a license is benignly coerced. A promise to be quiet under threat of harm is violently coerced. They're not what I'm thinking about.

I bathed my 10-and-a-half-year-old daughter and washed her hair for the first time in at least six years. Thanks to her broken ring finger on her right hand, and a midnight blue fiberglass cast that can’t get wet, she needs help. At first, it felt odd to me, cleansing this independent and maturing child of mine. The last time that I did this, her body was mushy with adorable baby fat, and the tub was filled with bath toys.

Mark Achtemeier and I once faced off at General Assembly over gay ordination. Sixteen years later, he preached at my ordination.

c. 2014 Religion News Service...

I was taught that my labors as a minister don’t count for my own spiritual life. Realizing that this is untrue has brought me great relief and joy.

I started singing in church choirs when I was  a teenager. There I learned to read music and find acceptance among the grown up singers. It was my church’s choir director who helped me find my spiritual voice again after a car accident that fractured my larynx. I went on to study vocal music, compose hymn lyrics and sing in choirs at my college, seminary and several churches over the years. There is a special kind of relationship that forms among choir members. Something about those rehearsals, with their jokes, irritations and prayer rituals, creates a spiritual bond that can’t be replicated anywhere else.

Glorybound takes place in a dying West Virginia town amidst people who are snake-handlers and prophets, to whom biblical language is as natural as breathing, and ...